Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Is righteous Rick Santorum too scary to be President?

Rick Santorum speaks with a Catholic stridency rarely seen in British politics (Photo: EPA)

Perhaps it is because I was brought up as a middle-of-the-road English Catholic – show up on Sundays, eat fish on Fridays (more expensive than meat now, of course) and don’t ever sing the hymns too loudly (that’s a vulgar habit Anglicans have) – that I find Rick Santorum so, um, scary.

Mr Santorum has been surging to the fore in the Republican nomination contest these last two weeks, riding high in the Rustbelt on a combination of his religious convictions and a blue collar, son-of-an immigrant backstory that resonates with the slump-hit voters of the American Midwest.

But in truth it is the religious part of the Santorum package that has me quailing like a choirboy caught swigging on the altar wine – and yes, Bless me Father, in that regard, I have sinned.

The latest Santorum pronouncement to send shivers along the pews is his remark this weekend that pre-natal testing (amniocentesis) is part of an Obama-backed plan to “cull the ranks of the disabled in our society” through the rising number of abortions that result from the tests.

The language is brutal (and, in point of fact, truthful) but more than that, it is Mr Santorum’s righteousness that risks alienating him from the popular mind.

Unlike the thrice-married Mr Gingrich (his fellow Catholic candidate) Mr Santorum is no hypocrite, which is exactly my point. I rather like hypocrites. I find them comforting since they remind me of myself and almost everyone else I know.

But Mr Santorum is moral tungsten. He has a child, Bella, with the usually-fatal genetic disorder Trisomy 18 and six other living children to prove that he has always practiced what the Catholic church preaches when it comes to contraception.

Were I a practising Catholic I’m sure I’d admire Mr Santorum’s trueness to the teachings of Rome, but to me, even for Catholics, these must be intensely personal moral choices (particularly for women) and not the stuff of point-scoring on the campaign trail.

Personally, I can’t escape the whiff of the witch-hunt about Mr Santorum, who is of a breed of Catholic unfamiliar to us English: a man of the strictest Catholic theology (he’s a big fan of Opus Dei, for example, and sent his children to an Opus Dei affiliated school in Washington) whose message is transmitted through a distinctly evangelical amplifier.

Perhaps it is just my Benedictine education (even the monks at my school admitted they were scared of the Jesuits and their ‘pressure-cooker’ spirituality) but I’m afraid I can’t find much that’s terribly sympathetic or merciful in Mr Santorum, and I’m not sure that’s a particularly good quality in a man who wants to assume the awesome responsibilities of the US presidency.